Charlamagne Tha God Discusses His New Book, Mental Health In Hip-Hop, & Kanye West On ‘For The Record’

Charlamagne Tha God’s second book Shook One: Anxiety Playing Tricks on Me details his ongoing journey of working through anxiety with the help of therapy. The media personality hopes that his story will encourage other people by removing some of the stigma around mental health issues. On the latest episode of For The Record, Charlamagne sits down with Genius' Head of Artist Relations Rob Markman to discuss the book, mental health in hip-hop, and the conversation around Kanye West.

“When I started going to therapy, I started to realize that anxiety is a mental health issue. It’s actually the number one mental health issue in America,” Charlamagne Tha God tells Genius about the motivation for the book. “I started realizing that, based on what I was telling my therapist, she was telling me I got PTSD and I got trauma from past experiences that I was dealing with. You gotta think I’m unpacking 40 years of bullshit, stuff that I’ve never talked about in depth… When you from the hood, you feel anything that makes you feel any kind of pain or anything that’s gonna make you feel vulnerable or soft or weak, you kind of step on that.”

Charlamagne says that he hopes many of today’s rappers to take a similar step. “Are they going to sit down with a therapist? Or are they sitting around with their boys smoking the weed and popping the pills and that’s what they call self care? So that’s what scares me about all of these dudes,” he elaborates. “I don’t want them to be self medicating. Actually go do the work, go sit down with a therapist. Nothing is crazy is about you sitting down and having a conversation with somebody.”

While addressing the topic of Kanye’s recent controversies, Charlamagne points out the hypocrisy of criticizing the Chicago native for being a contrarian when that’s why people embraced him in the first place. “The thing about Ye is, this is who he is. When everybody’s going left, he goes right,” he explains. “If you loved Ye then for that, this really shouldn’t stop your love now… Some people look at him and they see signs of somebody that’s manic. You look at him, you like, ‘Okay, yeah he’s clearly going through something.’ If you think that, if you really think that, how can we shit on that? If anything, you’d be trying to get him some help. Encourage him to get some real help. Like, ‘Nah, you don’t need to be off your meds. You need to be on your meds.’”

Check out the full interview with Charlamagne Tha God in the video above. Stay tuned next week for another new episode of For The Record.